In/human Traffic

1773. A letter and gift from prominent British abolitionist Granville Sharp prompt a thank you from Arthur Lee, whose antislavery writings circulated among abolitionists at home and abroad. Sharp may have encountered Lee in London, or possibly become acquainted through his abolitionist correspondent in Philadelphia, Anthony Benezet, who reprinted both of Lee's antislavery essays. Those essays model many of the strengths and weaknesses of antebellum antislavery literature. While recognizing fully the contradiction between colonial agitation for liberty and the continued use of enslaved laborers, and despite his rational and spiritual aversion to slavery, Arthur surrenders to the "inhuman traffic" in the last year of his life. 

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Transcript

Stratford Mail 

IV.

Welcome to Stratford Mail, a Production of Stratford Hall Historic Preserve, where we give voice to Stratford Hall’s people, places and past to engage, educate, and inspire. Find us on the web at stratfordhall.org. I’m Director of Research Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey.

This month we read a return letter dated 1773 from Stratford-born Arthur Lee of Virginia, then resident of London, to Granville Sharp, a civilian clerk working at the Board of Ordnance in London but widely known for his antislavery efforts. Sharp would resign his clerk’s post in 1776 because he would participate in shipping munitions to the revolting colonies, whose cause he supported.

[1773 Letter] “Dear Sir,

I received, and am extremely obliged to you, for the Books you were so kind as to send me. Your noble defence of Freedom deserves the thanks of every friend to truth, humanity and justice. The Law of England is a law of mercy, of righteousness, of Liberty. Is it possible then, that it can authorize a practice subversive of every principle of right, humanity, and freedom? Villenage, the only kind of Slavery ever known in England, unquestionably originated in the Violence of War. The law found it established; it neither created, nor countenanced it. But the principles of the Law were ever adverse to it, and the practice seized on the slightest pretences to discountenance and dissolve it. What it could not tear up by the roots, without violence equal to that by which the Evil was planted, it endeavored by slow degrees to sap and destroy. Happily it has succeeded. Accursed be he who endeavors to replant this most pernicious weed!”

Arthur opens by arguing that the defunct system of English serfdom or villenage preceded the development of English common law, but that common law (grounded in mercy, justice, and freedom) gradually eradicated this initial form of unfreedom in England. 

The book titles Arthur gratefully received from Granville, we cannot know for certain, but they surely belonged to the antislavery genre given the subject matter of Arthur’s reply; and Granville perhaps included a copy of his own influential pamphlet with the long title: A Representation of the injustice and dangerous tendency of admitting the least claim of private property in the persons of men, in England. This was the first major antislavery work by a British author, and in it the self-educated Sharp aimed to refute the proslavery precedent set by the Yorke-Talbot opinion of 1729. Written by two ranking law officers of the Crown, Yorke-Talbot held that:

“We are of opinion, that a slave coming from the West-Indies to Great-Britain or Ireland, with or without his master, doth not become free, and that his master's property or right in him is not thereby determined or varied; and that baptism doth not bestow freedom on him, or make any alteration in his temporal condition in these kingdoms. We are also of opinion, that his master may legally compel him to return again to the plantations.” 

Sharp’s rebuttal of Yorke-Talbot was so forceful that it attracted the attention of Philadelphia Quaker Anthony Benezet, founder of the first American abolition society, who soon established correspondence with  Sharp. In 1766 Benezet had published an anthology of antislavery writings, which quoted generously from a prior 1764 pamphlet titled An Essay in Vindication of the Continental Colonies of America, from a Censure of Mr. Adam Smith, in His Theory of Moral Sentiments. With Some Reflections on Slavery in General. By an American. Written in response to a perceived strain of Anti-Americanism in philosopher and economist Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, that pamphlet offered this assessment of slavery: it is evident, that the bondage we have imposed on the Africans, is absolutely repugnant to justice … it is shocking to humanity, violative of every generous sentiment, abhorrent utterly from the Christian religion.  

From the voice you may have guessed that the author was a newly-minted physician from the University of Edinburgh by the name of Arthur Lee, who explained to his brother Richard Henry Lee his reluctance to return to America: The extreme aversion I have to slavery, and to the abominable objects of it with you, the Blacks; with the lamentable state of dependence in which I perceive America must for many years be held by Britain, makes me dread a return to America. notwithstanding I am drawn to it by the strongest ties of family affection and patriotic love. The 24-year-old Arthur’s views on slavery (and he is clearly antislavery) are still very much informed by toxic notions of European supremacy and ill-informed ideas of African barbarism, attitudes which persist to this day at many levels of society and drive some of our cultural frictions. It is nevertheless important to note that already in 1765 Arthur has interrupted the silence of his southern peers on the contradiction between using slavery as a metaphor for colonial grievances and the ongoing use of enslaved laborers in those same colonies. 

At the urging of his brother and mentor Richard Henry, Arthur Lee finally came home to Virginia, but soon returned to Great Britain after an abortive stint as a physician in provincial Williamsburg. On his return to London in 1768 he steps into the role of a politico seeking to shape public opinion through a torrential outpour of essays, pamphlets, petitions, and letters. The terrain of his political writing on the trouble between Great Britain and its colonies is deeply marked by his struggles with slavery. In a series of popular essays appearing under the pseudonym Monitor, Arthur writes: slavery is the monstrous mother of every abominable vice, and every atrocious ill (Monitor VI). In 1773, the year he replies to Granville Sharp, Arthur publishes in the Virginia Gazette. There he urges his fellow colonists to make common cause against a predatory Britain. Rhetorically, he overlaps a summons to political resistance with a clear and distinct perception of what slavery is—To live a life of rational beings, is to live free; to live a life of slaves is to die by inches (January 28, 1773). It is clear from Arthur’s reply to Granville that his objection to the “inhuman traffic” has roots in his Anglican piety (which he shares with Sharp) and specifically in his acceptance that all human beings are created in the image of God no matter how physically and/or culturally dissonant they may seem to us.  

[1773 Letter] “In whatever light we view slavery, it is inadmissible! In a political light, it is pernicious. In a legal light,... unjust! In a moral light,... inhuman. In a religious light,... impious! Who can read in the Holy Scriptures that Man was created in the image of God, and yet dare to trample on that sacred image with as little ceremony as if it represented a heathen idol? There is no Act of Parliament which directly disposes of the liberty of the Africans, and dooms them to Bondage. But if there were--it would be so destitute of that Justice which is essential to the support of all laws, that it would be absolutely void. If the African were to ask, by what authority human or divine, the Parliament of Great Britain undertook to make laws for those who were never under its jurisdiction, what satisfactory answer could be made to him? In what does the African trader differ from the Algerine Corsair, but that the one invades the rights and liberties of mankind on shore, the other at Sea; the one by fraud and bribery, the other by force; the one professes himself a Christian, the other an infidel. Where the purpose is equally bad, the means by which it is accomplished makes little alteration in the crime. Whether a villain gets into my House to rob and murder me at the hour of rest, by breaking my door or bribing my servant, he is still a robber and murderer. And it will not, I presume, be contended that professing ourselves Christians, authorizes us more than the Infidels, to transgress the universal bans both of God and nature; to trample upon every principle of justice, and violate every feeling of humanity. These pretences may screen offenders in the corrupt courts of Man, where as Shakespeare well observes, the wicked Prize itself buys out the law; but there surely is a tribunal where offended justice will have atonement, and injured humanity will not plead in vain. He who perseveres in this inhuman traffic, fearless of such a Consequence, must be the fool, who hath said in his heart,--there is no God.”     

To summarize Arthur’s reflections so far: Slavery had its origin in practices of war, but was gradually eliminated by the underlying principles and application of common law. The absence of any positive law authorizing the enslavement of Africans means that slavery is not only irreligious—it’s also lawless. But any such law would violate both the divine order and natural law, what Jefferson would later term unalienable rights, including life and liberty. An independent United States would struggle to live up to that promise. Meantime Arthur was aware of desperate proslavery loophole arguments and gives us a glimpse into some of those pathetic attempts to justify slavery, including an appeal to the 1547 Vagrancy Act of Edward VI:

[1773 Letter] “The African merchant acclaims in great triumph, observe First Edward Six chapter 3: ‘He that takes a Servant or Beggar idle three days together shall have him as his slave.’ It is true that such an Act did exist, enabling a Justice of Peace to condemn vagrants to two years Service, and enacting many similar outrages, to authorize which it might have with equal propriety been quoted. But it is also true, that in three years time, by the Third and Fourth Edward Six chapter sixteen, that wicked Act was in these very points condemned and repealed. The justice and humanity of the public could not endure the existence of such a law, though affecting only the most worthless of the community, which is surely a full condemnation of the practice which this Act was brought to support.”    

Between his 1764 essay in reply to Smith and this 1773 letter to Sharp, Arthur published another major antislavery essay in Rind’s Virginia Gazette, dated March 19, 1767. Written under the pseudonym Philanthropos (lover of humankind), and addressed to the Virginia House of Burgesses, the essay proposed to treat the inhuman traffic in two instalments, the first of which is commonly known as the Address on Slavery. Publisher William Rind declined to print the second instalment (presumably due to the blowback he received about the first); a notice appeared in rival Purdie and Dixon’s Virginia Gazette acknowledging receipt of the second instalment but deferring its publication indefinitely. The first instalment was a barnburner. 

“There cannot be in nature, there is not in all history, an instance in which every right of men is more flagrantly violated.” 

Abolitionist Anthony Benezet was so impressed with Lee’s Address that he posted a copy to Benjamin Franklin in London. And in the second edition of Benezet’s anthology of antislavery writings, he added as an appendix an abridged version of this 1767 essay. Benezet nevertheless found the essay too incendiary in parts and abridged it in keeping with “the general opinion, that nothing ought to be published whereby the Negroes may be made acquainted with their own strength and the apprehension of danger the whites are in from them (Benezet to Robert Pleasants, 8 April 1773). 

Arthur had not held back on this point: “Slavery, wherever encouraged, has sooner or later been productive of very dangerous commotions … On us, or on our posterity, the inevitable blow, must, one day, fall; and probably with the most irresistible vengeance.” Whether (as some suggest) the essay was intended to support a series of legislative initiatives in the Virginia House seeking to impose significant duties on the importation of the enslaved, it wandered away from curtailment of the inhuman traffic into outright abolition. In the end, Arthur could not abide the ugly incongruity of arguing for liberty while enslaving African and African-American men, women, and children in America. He felt the force of his old acquaintance Samuel Johnson’s query: How is that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes? What we have in this 1767 essay is Arthur Lee striving to save Virginia’s honor by destroying its economy. Arthur never wrote another essay on the inhuman traffic; his talents and energies drifted toward politics where he became a spy, propagandist, and diplomat. His 1767 essay concluded: Happy shall I be if my poor attempts should prompt more able Heads to think and write upon a Subject, of such lasting import to the welfare of the Community. When Arthur Lee died at Lansdowne in 1792, records incredibly show that his estate included several enslaved folks, including bodyservant Philip the African, and two enslaved carpenters Osman and Edmund bought from Ludwell Lee in June 1792.  His last will and testament did not free these men, but rather gave them to his brother Richard Henry. How can this be? He knew it to be wrong; he knew it to be vile; his views cannot be more clear. 

We cannot know finally what motivated Arthur Lee to violate deeply held values—perhaps it was convenience, perhaps a supportive culture in Virginia, the allure of power and status, or perhaps something else altogether—no matter what it was, at the end of his life he infected himself with what in 1767 he himself termed a “very fatal train of vices,” and he knew he would be answerable for this offense against justice when he met the God in whom he believed. 

[1773 Letter] “I congratulate you Sir most cordially, on the Success of your noble exertions against slavery here. Would to God the evil were not too deeply rooted in America, to give us hope of any other relief, than that, which the gradual operation of the same mild means which eradicated it here, may produce. Do me the favor of making my compliments to all the Harmonious family. And believe me to be with great esteem, Dear sir, your obliged, and very humble servant, Arthur Lee”

In 1772 Granville Sharp spearheaded a decisive challenge to the Yorke-Talbot opinion. The case centered on the fate of African-born, Virginia-bought James Somerset, who escaped from his master Charles Stewart while they visited England. Somerset received Christian baptism in England, and may have taken his spiritual rebirth to warrant a new status. Stewart apprehended Somerset and packed him off on a ship bound for Jamaica, but Somerset’s Christian godparents filed a writ of habeas corpus and Somerset was reprieved until a trial could be held. Granville Sharp soon organized a team of 5 lawyers to represent Somerset pro bono. Newspapers followed the case closely and daily, publishing letters from proslavery and antislavery factions. 

The judge Lord Mansfield framed the legal question in terms of whether “coercion can be exercised in this country, on a slave according to the American laws?” Despite his ambivalence on the matter of slavery, Lord Mansfield ruled that: “Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from a decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged.” More than a decade later Mansfield argued that his ruling meant only that an enslaved person could not be forcibly removed from England against his or her will. It was popularly understood to mean no person was a slave while on English soil. Actually, the Somerset ruling did not terminate slaveholding in England, British participation in the slave trade, or slavery in other parts of the empire, but it contested the Yorke-Talbot opinion and galvanized the abolition struggle in England. It is the Somerset case Arthur has in mind when he congratulates Granville for his “noble exertions against slavery.” It wasn’t until 1807 that Parliament suppressed the slave trade, but slavery continued to exist in England until the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.   

In America, word of the ruling spread from plantation to plantation, and enslaved folks began to look to British liberty for their emancipation. Granville Sharp fought to abolish slavery until his death in 1813; he also resigned his post in the Ordnance office because it implicated him in an unjust war against his fellow subjects; he would not be complicit in provisioning and shipping munitions to be used against Americans in this terrible war. 

But that’s a story for another day.

Thank you for listening and subscribing to Stratford Mail, from Stratford Hall Historic Preserve in Westmoreland County, Virginia, I’m Director of Research Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey

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